Per Caritatem

With these things in mind (see part II), we may speculate on some of the connections which Dostoevsky’s polysemous text invites.  Alyosha and Fr. Zosima, both characters noted for their concrete, embodied interaction with people, serve as contrasting figures to Ivan (and the rationalist nihilists whom Nietzsche so often laments). The latter group remains aloof, unable to translate the abstract into their concrete, embodied, communal existence.  On the one hand, we have Ivan, who collects stories about the sufferings of children and theorizes as to why such suffering takes place. On the other hand, we have Alyosha, who personally visits the poor in their homes, stands up for suffering children like Ilyusha and treats those socially ostracized, such as Gryshenka and Snegiryov with respect.  With the contrast between Ivan and Alyosha, Dostoevsky brings to our attention the need to move beyond the abstract (which is not to suggest that abstract ideas are without value) and enter into the concrete through active, personal engagement with individuals.   Insofar as Alyosha represents a Christ-like figure, Dostoevsky uses Alyosha’s exchange with Snegiryov to exhibit in both words (the conversation itself) and act (Alyosha’s actual visit and time spent with the captain and his family) a portrait of God’s love and its transforming effects in this world.

From the passages above (IV.3, 7), we saw Alyosha’s willingness to show Ilyusha compassion.  In stark contrast, Zarathustra holds compassion in low-esteem and views exhibitions of pity with great suspicion.  According to Zarathustra, pitying another person causes resentment in the recipient and is simply a way for the person showing pity to think himself better than others. In the sections entitled, “On the Rabble” and “On Tarantulas,”[1] Zarathustra re-visits this idea of resentment (or ressentiment) with both recalling categories and themes discussed in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.  For example, in the Genealogy, we are introduced to master and slave morality.  The weak, in their slave morality, resent the power of their masters, as well as their inability to retaliate against their masters.  Because the weak see no justice in this life, they invent an other-worldly realm where God metes out ultimate justice. Slave morality is credited with having invented the concepts of evil and good-concepts which are defined in reference to the masters (those in power).  The great flaw of slave morality is the way in which the weak define themselves in terms their masters rather than carving out their own definition of themselves.  According to Nietzsche, values are constantly in flux; consequently, notions of good and evil are always changing and cannot be fixed.  Whatever the current conceptions of good and evil happen to be, these will remain the dominant way of thinking until a different group comes into power and re-creates new conceptions.  Interestingly, in this genealogical account of morals, Nietzsche concedes that the slave morality ultimately involves a cleverness about it, because it was able to trans-value the then-dominant values of its day.  For instance, the slaves turned the qualities associated with the masters-powerful, wealthy, strong, cruel-into a description of evil characteristics.  Likewise, they transformed their own characteristics-weak, poor, lacking in power, compassionate-into a description of good qualities.  Even though he grants this cleverness to slave morality, ultimately both Zarathustra and Nietzsche despise the ressentiment that drives it, as ressentiment in seemingly deterministic fashion produces nay-sayers who have their eyes fixed on some other-worldly world, and consequently, degrade and devalue the body and this world.  Lastly, in his discussion of the “ugliest man,” who, according to Zarathustra, murdered God because he couldn’t bear God’s constant, ever-present, penetrating gaze, we are told that the one sentiment that the ugliest man could not endure is to be shown pity.[2] One then can only imagine how repulsed he would be at the infinite mercy displayed and offered to all in Christ’s self-giving death-for-others.

The final comparison between these two thinkers (and characters) centers on how each views mystery and in a sense its opposite, rationalism.  Interestingly and perhaps even surprisingly, both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky embrace mystery and reject the rationalistic systems (as well as the “scient-ism”) so prevalent in nineteenth-century.  In the “Drunken Song,”[3] Zarathustra alludes to what many scholars call “night wisdom,” which is a metaphor for the all-encompassing mystery that permeates our lives.  For Zarathustra, “night wisdom” is contrasted with “day wisdom,” with the former clearly preferred to the supposed systematic clarity and scientific precision of the latter.  In a passage contrasting Hegel’s day wisdom and Nietzsche’s night wisdom, Robert Wood provides a helpful elucidation of Nietzsche’s view:

For Hegel the telos of the world-process is to have the Whole come to clear expression.  But the crucial differences are, first of all, the dominance of chance in Nietzsche’s view and, secondly, the superiority of “night wisdom” over Hegelian “day wisdom.”  The latter distinction is most important.  The poetic word is able to bring us into relation with encompassing mystery.  We do not turn our backs on the encompassing darkness that surrounds the sea of light, the world of our senses and what is logically entailed by it.  Through the poet we can gain a sense of the continuity of the manifest and the hidden, and the sheltering of the former in the latter.  We can live out of a sense of encompassing mystery.  In Hegel that is only a moment to be overcome in “day wisdom,” the science of wisdom that reveals the ultimate Logos.[4]

Consistent with his polemic against and abhorrence of other-worldly worlds inhabited by static Forms or Divine Ideas, Nietzsche’s praise of night wisdom exalts the unknown, which by definition cannot be controlled, managed or predicted.  Whereas one knows Being, one experiences Becoming, as knowing it is impossible given its constant fluid condition.

In the section “On Self Overcoming,” Zarathustra’s rebuke of the philosophers on account of their inordinate lust for knowledge is a variation on the theme of night wisdom’s glory.  According to Zarathustra, such philosophers are those driven by a “will to the thinkability of all beings” and a desire to “make all beings thinkable.”[5] In other words, rather than embrace the unknown and that which cannot be penetrated by human reason, these self-proclaimed wise men attempt to mold both reason and the world to fit and reflect their own pre-conceived notions.   Thus, in their very conception of knowledge, such philosophers fundamentally deny “night wisdom,” or at best see it as a moment to be overcome (Hegel).

Dostoevsky, given his Russian Orthodox paradigm, also has a high view Mystery.[6] We see this ready acceptance of mystery, miracles and super-natural irruptions into the natural in the way that Alyosha and Fr. Zosima live, move, and have their being.[7] Yet, the Mystery embraced by Alyosha and Zosima ultimately has a face, the face of Jesus Christ, which then moves Christian Mystery from an abstract ideal to incarnate Person.  Dostoevsky would no doubt agree with Nietzsche that Mystery is something experienced rather than manipulated and managed; yet, ironically, Nietzsche’s “night wisdom,” and ever-elusive Becoming, having no face, remains abstract, impersonal, distant, and dis-embodied.  This is not, however, to suggest that a believer’s union with Christ and ultimate deification somehow brings about total clarity in which God is fully comprehended and all mystery is vanquished.  Rather, Mystery is just as ineradicable as the distinction between Creator and creature, Infinite and finite; yet, these distinctions neither prohibit genuine knowledge nor intimate fellowship with the God who, however paradoxical it may be, becomes in the Incarnation both creature and finite while remaining Creator and Infinite.

Notes

[2] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 377.

[3] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 429-36.

[4] Robert Wood, “High and Low in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,” unpublished paper, pp. 21-22.

[5] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 225.

[6] The Russian word for mystery is “тайна,” from which derives the Russian word, “таинство,” meaning sacrament as a holy mystery.

[7] In book one, chapter five, (”Elders”), the narrator describes Alyosha as a “realist,” but a realist who is also a believer. (The term for Christian believer in Russian is “верующий”).  The narrator then proceeds to describe how an unbelieving  realist (”истинный реалист, если он не верующий”) approaches miracles and faith.  “I fancy that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one.  Oh, no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist.  It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief.  The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.  Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him.  Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith” (The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 19-20).